All posts tagged ‘Mario Ware: Smooth Moves’

Shooting stars at origami ninjas in the new Nintendo Land game for Wii U. Photo credit: Andrea Schwalm.

As a new parent a decade-and-a-half ago I decided that I was going to raise my children in a commercial-television-free/video-game-free household. At the time, the American Pediatric Association was suggesting that children under 2 watch no television/have no screen time at all and that children over 2 receive no more than 1-2 hours of quality programming/screen time per day. I was going to do the American Pediatric Association one better, however: I aimed for no commercial television for anyone in the house at all (and only very-occasional use of the VCR for my son). When the time came to discuss video games, the conversation would be simple: my children would ask and I would earnestly explain, “You may play video games when you’re an adult.”

We made it through 4 years (and one month-long hospital visit with kiddo #2) of parenthood before we did a complete about-face and caved on the no-television. Three years after that we were buying our first gaming console–a Playstation 2. This was followed almost immediately by a stream of Gameboys, Nintendo DSs, and iPod Touches provided by a loving, collaborative team of aunts, uncles, and Santa Clauses. In 2007 we purchased a Wii and just last month we bought an Xbox 360 to celebrate kiddo #2′s accolade-laden report card. All in all, quite a fall from screen-free grace.